Mainland Moms Get Jail Time in Hong Kong

Hospital staff attend to newborn babies in the nursery ward of the Union Hospital in Hong Kong, China, on Oct. 18, 2011.

HONG KONG—Authorities here have arrested more than 400 mainland Chinese women who have traveled to give birth in the former British colony in the past year, immigration officials said, underscoring the depth of tensions between mainland Chinese and their southern neighbors over the practice.

Most of the new mothers were arrested within one to two days of giving birth, and nearly all were sentenced to jail terms of about two months, officials said.

Giving birth in Hong Kong, which operates under a separate legal system, has emerged in recent years as a popular option for mainland Chinese women seeking access to the city’s advanced health and education systems for their children, who gain the automatic right to reside in Hong Kong if they’re born there.

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However, “birth tourists” are bitterly resented by many locals, who argue the women pose a threat to the city’s health and education resources. In 2010, among some 88,000 babies born in Hong Kong, about 45% were born to mainland women.

This week, the city’s Immigration Department said that since last October, roughly 420 pregnant women from the mainland who gave birth in Hong Kong have been prosecuted on charges of overstaying visas.

“To protect social resources [in Hong Kong], I think it’s needed,” a department spokesman said of the crackdown.

It’s not clear whether the prosecutions over the past year represent an increase. Immigration officials said the government only started tracking such cases last year in response to public concern about the issue.

The women weren’t arrested until after they gave birth, out of humanitarian considerations, the spokesman said. “It’s not good for pregnant women to stay in prison,” he said, adding that their children could be cared for by relatives until the mothers’ sentences were completed.

A spokesman for the city’s correctional services department said that babies of prisoners could also stay in the prison with their mothers while they were still breast-feeding. Babies would live with their mothers in dormitory-style wards, with the babies given their own cribs.

In recent months, immigration authorities have been working closely with their mainland counterparts, accelerating efforts to thwart pregnant mainland women at the border.

Over the past year, the Immigration Department said, 3,500 pregnant mainland women have been barred from trying to enter Hong Kong, a jump of more than 80% from 2011.

A dozen other mainlanders this year also have been jailed for up to a year for helping to assist mainland women to give birth in Hong Kong, including forging documents, offering accommodations and immigration coaching. The checks at the border will continue, the immigration department said. Meanwhile, government authorities are also appealing to the public to report any pregnant mainland women who seem to have overstayed their visas.

The city has long been an attractive destination for mainland Chinese seeking to hedge their bets abroad, with many choosing to buy property in the former British colony and give birth to their children in its hospitals.

For some women, giving birth in Hong Kong is also a way to try to skirt China’s one-child policy by remaining under the radar of mainland authorities, though in Guangdong province, authorities have said women will be fined if they are found to have given birth to an unauthorized second child in Hong Kong.

Every year, some 28 million mainland Chinese tourists visit Hong Kong—a city of 7 million. Some locals fear they are being crowded out by their northern neighbors, and that such numbers risk diluting the city’s identity. Many Hong Kong locals have participated in demonstrations this year to protest the influx of such visitors, who arrive in Hong Kong to buy luxury goods as well as daily necessities, from milk powder to soy sauce, which are seen as having better guarantees on quality. The issue of mainland mothers has been a source of particular anxiety in Hong Kong, which has seen its birthrate decline for years. Currently, all children born to mainland mothers on Hong Kong soil are automatically given the local right of abode.

Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s new chief executive, announced in April—before he took office—that starting next year, mainland women won’t be permitted to give birth in private Hong Kong hospitals unless they are married to a permanent resident or have valid working visas. The city has also set a cap on births by non-local women in the city’s public hospitals.

Mavis Chang, a 34-year-old Hong Kong resident who gave birth in July, says local health facilities are overstretched. She was urged to book a hospital bed as soon as she knew she was pregnant to avoid be crowded out. “Once I confirmed my fetus had a heartbeat, I had to pay a deposit immediately—by then it had been just seven weeks. It was really stressfu,” she said.

After the birth, she says, when she visited a crowded local health clinic for babies, she said that the majority of women appeared be from the mainland. ”The clinic was full of Mandarin-speaking mothers,” she said. ”I don’t have any bias towards any nationality, it doesn’t matter if that person is Mandarin-speaking or English- or Cantonese-speaking, I just feel that it was very crowded.”

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